Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

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It's hard to condemn someone for failing to try to implement their idea when the attempt comes with such a high opportunity cost and risk. Who is going to bear that risk? Their friends and family? Their children? And who will take the blame when 999/1000 of them fail and are forced onto the street?

Maybe this is an argument for UBI-style social security, that it would free millions of people from bearing direct responsibility for their livelihood and enable them to pursue otherwise risky ideas, and the explosion of ideas being tested against reality would maximize the value that every individual could provide. It certainly sounds romantic, but forgive me for being a bit skeptical that it would actually be good for the people involved.

Spend too much time in chaos and you'll be scorched, sandblasted to the bone by it. Fail to confront it at all by hiding behind order and you'll decay from the inside out. The human condition is to stand on the border of renewing chaos and stabilizing order. You need both.

> And who will take the blame when 999/1000 of them fail and are forced onto the street?

The 1 in 1000 which succeeds would alone provide so much quality of life to society that while it's true that the 999 would see monetary value evaporate, ultimately what really matters is quality of life.

Think for instance about nuclear fusion. Many are trying. The contemporaries of the person who eventually gets it right who are also trying to make fusion happen will go bankrupt...but they are still better off than a world in which all of 1000 decided not to try and make fusion happen.

That's a true tragedy of the commons, the best thing for society is for everybody to try their ambitious ideas, whereas every individual is on the fence, not sure that others will also followthrough and everybody backpedals into searching for risk-free yield which beats inflation instead.

I think you're stretching the phrase "tragedy of the commons" too thin. The lesson in that story is that property ownership actually nets more value out of the property than 'nobody' owning it, because without a responsible steward then the populous strip mines it until it becomes useless to everyone. Of course there's the danger of the the owner doing the same if they are too short-sighted, which I think we might be seeing in many people's attitudes and businesses today.

You're using it to lament that people don't just sacrifice themselves for the greater good, which bears little resemblance to the original meaning. It also bears little resemblance to reality; you may observe that the most productive complex systems are the ones where the benefit to the individual is made to align with the benefit to the group, but your strategy is for the individual to shaft themselves so that some nameless "everybody else" gets the benefit. Reality check, that's never going to work. Instead aim for a system where the individual's interests are aligned with the groups interests. It's not that I don't see the value in maximizing the generation of new ideas, but for this to work everybody has to be on board for themselves where being onboard for yourself is good for the system.

If there's any modern corollary to "tragedy of the commons" it's open source software in general. People and companies use it for great gain but scarcely contribute back, strip mine its maintainers of value until they burn out and the project dies.

Is that not an argument for socialism (perhaps not full socialism, but at least in more areas)?

In your analogy you needed 999 risk takers to fail, but if that one person succeeding will be so fantastic for humanity why don't we the taxpayers fund all 1000 (or 2000!) so that we're more confident of getting there and don't need 999 people to invest their life energy just to get pipped at the post?

How do you know society can only produce 999 failures?

Well the hypothetical I was replying to presumably counted the hypothetical 1000 people at the end not the beginning of the hypothetical research.

But yes of course you can't start something complicated and know exactly how many people or how much budget will definitely be required, that's already true whether you're trying to develop groundbreaking nuclear technology, or building a bridge, or a computer game. That doesn't stop both capitalist and socialist initiatives being funded currently, it's just a complexity that needs to be dealt with as well as possible.

Former nuclear fusion startup founder here. I ended up evicted and living in my car after it didn't work out. But I still wish the current set of researchers all the luck in the world, because successful fusion power production could do so much for the world.

So I'm really feeling this comment.

I'm not sure if I ever want to get back up on that horse, and I'm uncertain if it's more because of the immense frustration of banging my head against the wall for years on end, or the pain from losing it all. That particular challenge (fusion) just feels too risky for me right now, and I don't know if that's going to change.

One thing I see that is missing from the VC-funded startup world, is a good way for founders to share their risk. VCs do a great job of distributing the risk for investors among a bunch of startups, so not all the eggs are in one basket. However, for a founder all their eggs are in that one basket. I know that Founderpool is helping in this space, but they are fairly new and it remains to be seen whether their approach or a different approach will be successful. But I think that there is definitely a need there (as well as money to be made), and hopefully addressing that risk for founders would result in a more entrepreneurial society.

Oh my gosh!

Sorry if it seemed that I was speaking about you directly.

I never thought fusion startup founders would hang out on HN! I've always imagined you guys would only interact in long email chains with .edu domains :)

> But I still wish the current set of researchers all the luck in the world, because successful fusion power production could do so much for the world

What about the contemporaries of those who succeed? Given the time slot in which you tried this might not apply to you anymore, because entrepreneurs like athletes need to be judged against their contemporaries, different eras don't matter.

As I was saying, according to your judgement, if General Fusion were to succeed at some point in 2035+, what would be the impact on the Commonwealth Fusion guys?

Do you think that the quality of life provided by fusion would still exceed the financial and morale blow of failure? I mean once a person sees their competitors succeed big (and the value of their own enterprise going to 0) does that entails a situation when said quality of life becomes "pushing on a string" and there's no return psychologically speaking? Even if it's something like fusion?

Hey, no need to apologize, you said nothing wrong.

I'm not the only fusion founder who occasionally hangs out here. I know at least one other who comments occasionally.

I tried to type up an answer to your questions, but apparently I still have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this that don't come out into text very easily, and I need to focus on my challenges of today rather than yesterday. So I'll just say that I hope that someone does succeed, and let the contemporaries of that time speak for themselves.

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