Game theory explains why smart people don't win | Hacker News Reader

Game theory explains why smart people don't win

timdenning.substack.com

7 pointspseudolus11 comments

There is a sense of irony here. The author is trying to come up with an intricate theory to "win" meanwhile hardworking people just steamroll him.

I was travelling a lot recently and the places that were most packed were almost always run by someone who was using every second to do something to either bring in customers or keep them satisfied.

But picking the right game, the right investment is pure luck, otherwise the game would become popular and then worthless. The writer assumes that there is always some creative labor to get wealthy exists without access to capital and know how but I doubt it. One thing though he is right about, it a job doesn't pay well now, it wont either in future. Get lucky, that's what I say.

Why do you think that work won’t be well‑paid in the future either? I don’t really understand

GP is saying of that if a particular job isn't well paid now, it won't be in the future. In other words, if you want to find a well-paid job in the future, look for the kind of job that's well-paid now. GP doesn't say why, but do you really wonder why?

No guarantee that a well paying job will be well paying in future but the ones that were low paying will not transform to high paying. At least aim for better paying jobs now where demand is higher than supply.

Whatever that causes a particular high skilled type of a job to become a low paying job now , it will be even worse in future. Ex. writing is a very high skilled job that is hard to survive on now, so it won't get any better. If technology is making a particular type of job to be very competitive then the quality of skill set becomes unimportant.

The blue collar jobs have been under pressure in the past because of importation of cheap labor. some people nowadays believe blue collar labor will become high paying; not me! They will just shut the businesses down once the blue collar labor becomes expensive and they would just import.. That is how the system works. The current system is designed to give capital more power than labor; in my opinion that is.

So is there a job that will be unexpectedly high paying ; obviously there will be some but only a few people will get lucky and game it correctly. It is not predictable.

remembers me of the joke:

two 7y old meet:

"everyone saying that i'm the smartest kid they've ever met. I'm talking like a grown up, can do calculus like a grown up - i think i will be a professor at 18. lol"

"You call that smart??? i've been carried around on arms and let'em swipe my a* until I was 6.."

This is Reddit antiwork slop.

I make work hard and make really good money. The lazy people end up unemployed in one of the worst economies in my life time.

Working hard in the correct game is rewarding. The point made here is that if you have picked the wrong game, you are wasting your time.

So yes senior programmers currently are being rewarded very generously due to the fact that software historically had near zero marginal cost. You could have write once and sell 10 billion times.

This changed. AI now requires significant capital investment and operating expense per customer, and also there is non zero chance that it replaces programmers completely. Aka expect companies will have less appetite to reward good programmers.

So I don’t think the prospects of working hard in software engineering look very good.

You make work hard?

Are you one of my coworkers?

It's also about half AI-written slop as opposed to the natural kind, according to Pangram.

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