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Comment by ranman | Hacker News Reader

> Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most.

This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

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> This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

Actually, PG advice is solid. Trying to guess the next big thing is not a winning strategy. More so for teenagers who lack a lot of skills including good judgement. Even if their guess was guaranteed spot-on, and the universe was rooting for you, once the cat is out of the bag, what advantage would a 15 years old have? They don't have any war chest or connections to survive.

If the goal is to optimize the individual's outcome, outside working towards a stable 9-5 career, their best bet is indeed building projects they're passionate about and utilizing the skills they gain in their next endeavour.

One way to waste your life is being constantly distracted by which industry is more profitable or has more potential, doubting yourself and switching context.

Depends on how you measure individual outcomes. Arguably, a life lived passionately is the best individual outcome, even if it doesn't result in you becoming rich. Maybe that's a privileged thing to say, and certainly if someone following their passions is staring down the barrel of poverty then they might want to rebalance in favor of their financial health, but in the absence of dire financial circumstances, passion is a good compass to follow. Certainly many people volunteer their time for causes they are passionate about, with no expectation of financial reward, and are happier for doing so.

What PG is noting is that sometimes (even if rarely), what an individual is passionate about can also be good for investors. But the passion comes first.

I think he’s saying that at the time when you’re making the prediction you can’t know. If you're gonna learn som core technology that you can use 7 years later (where he suggests programming) then this makes sense.

I think there’s a strong element of luck here: even if you have general purpose skills in eg programming or CS, once a novel opportunity presents itself, you likely won’t have a head start, especially today. But what can you do about it? Telling kids who are 14-15 that they should bet on some more niched tech like LLMs or even transformers would likely be terrible advice.

I upvoted because I thought it was a clever observation (meaning one that did not obviously present itself to me), although I did need https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763016 to explain what you meant.

Becoming among the best in the world at one or an intersection of things is an excellent individual outcome, and one way to do that is to work hard on what interests you.

You can certainly become the best in the world at some combination of things that don’t interest you, but that seems less fun.

> This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

I don't get your comment. Are you saying PG is trying to deter and throw off teenagers so they don't compete in the space he invested in?

No. Survivorship Bias.

No, they're saying 1000 bets on random foundational technology means PG is more likely to have a startup to invest in that's a winner, then necessarily giving good advice to the individual founder who doesn't have 1000 turns at the wheel.

This does make sense. I think it's also possible that most of the successes PG sees are people doing something interesting to them. So the argument would be more like: among success stories, true interest is more common than trend chasing.

Of course YC funds tons of ChatGPT wrappers so dunno.

The founder who tries to do something boring and profitable ends up doing things like making another CRM or some kind of SaaS pipeline from one thing to another. These tend to be things that get built anyway by the people with more funding. There's so many CRMs built on top of vtiger open source, and these may be better than vtiger for a while, but in the long run they fall behind.

Paradoxically, avoiding risks makes people more likely to take the riskier options.

And yet, what makes most people on average the most amount of money is working on boring problems, not sexy, new technology problems. That is what is mainly implied by the top level parent. For every Elon making rockets, many more are more likely to make a significant amount of money just building another CRM.

I wonder: what better advice, that optimizes for individual outcomes, would you offer founders-to-be instead?

Be lucky?

I don't have any particular advice. I've been very lucky to join a few companies that were on the run up at the time but I never really knew at the time that they were going to be successful.

I just think blindly pursuing passion to the exclusion of profit will leave most people happy (or not) but impoverished and some people happy, lucky, and wealthy.

It was really just a tongue in cheek comment. I think Paul's advice is inspirational but it should be checked with a healthy dose of reality.

Incidentally, Paul's advice is the best advice I heard for maximising your luck surface area. You know that saying: luck is where preparation meets opportunity.

I don't know anybody impoverished from trying to build something. Even if they failed, the lessons they learned and people they met in the process offered plenty of future opportunities.

On the other hand, I know plenty of people unhappy with their lot in life but who didn't try anything to improve it when they could. They like to complain a lot and impose their bitterness and skepticism on the young dreamers.

And our society needs many, many more dreamers. Because when they succeed, as seldom as it happens, we all end up better thanks to them.

it seems like PG doesn't worry about AI replacing programmers

He’s hiring them, so if there’s no programmers, but a program— well, okay

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