Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

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I think you can extend this transposition across a lot more career paths: athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, models, film directors, etc. Any career where the financial outcome can be described by a power law follows the same dynamics, has the same gatekeepers, who have the same abusive/sycophantic relationships to market participants.

When I was raising VC I related more to struggling artist than employed technologists. Being constantly rejected, needing to be seen as more gifted than the competition and the goddamn urgency to catch on fire yesterday were the same and we got along great even if we understood and cared nothing about each other's work.

People who are considering one of these paths have an opportunity to learn from folks who might not do what they do exactly, but have been in the same sort of system. To realise the relationships they're buying into, the price they'll need to pay for a shot at stardom and to think if it's really an experience they can afford.

Keep going. This isn't unique to basically anything. Theres an analogy here for practically any case where there is scarcity and some manner of investment.

That said, I think this article is wins on providing me a window into the college athlete's world. It's a space that I feel like rarely shows up in popular media, is ripe for abuse and the stakes are definitely very high. Very interesting read for that.

There are definitely "tournament" activities that are more winners take all than others. The stakes are probably actually higher to the degree consequences are stumbling down a dead-end path for years. I'm actually not convinced playing a sport in college while realizing you're not going to make it to the pros is such a terrible thing. Presumably they got something out of it. And lots of people play sports in college or do a multitude of other things that may--or may not--provide huge professional benefit.

I spoke to a guy once who made gun parts, rifle bits for specific military uses. Their industry is also describable with power laws but at a much slower pace. You toil away selling a handful of units to a narrow group of highly-regulated customers, sometimes for decades, until you get that call to demonstrate your products for someone big (ie the US army). If you win, the next order is for tens of thousands of units. You license/outsource your design for a hundred per unit and walk away with a steady income that will last generations.

yes, and my pet theory is that the power law for creative professions (and others like realtors) come from low barriers of entry.

I think it comes from modern mass media technology. If musician A is better than B there is little reason to listen to B, unless you live in 1600 and musician A works in the next town over.

Modern mass media cannot generally differentiate between A and B because there are zillions of indistinguishable musicians invading the attention of people with very different marketing capacities.

Aka perfect information is a myth

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information

Nah, it existed when barrier to entry was much, much higher. What causes it is the fact that with recording and copying technology, creative work scales extremely well, especially with positive feedback effects of popularity and marketing. This is what creates the very small number of very high earners. If anything, the lower barriers to entry (especially with regards to being able to distribute your work) have flattened the curve a little bit, as the long tail of obscure artists is longer and thicker than ever (and the shape is the same: each obscure genre/subculture has a few artists doing very compared to the others, though it also flattens off once you're looking at artists who primarily make money from commission work, as that doesn't scale nearly as much).

There's probably some truth to that. You either have gatekeepers or a huge number of people just fail. (Even with gatekeepers a lot of people just fail anyway but but of people just don't get the opportunity to participate--which may or may not be efficient.)

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