Startups

I proposed sometime ago that LW members who want to make money to fund x-risk research could start a part-time programming project or startup together. I'm a poor businessman but a pretty good programmer, and would be up for joining such a thing immediately if it existed. No one took up the offer.

It might be nice to see a breakdown of this goal from an epistemic vs instrumental rationality perspective. I.e. from an epistemic perspective, your terminal value is probably NOT to found a startup. It is probably something else: money? seeing an idea instituted? control over your daily activities? What are the best ways to achieve those things? "Found a startup" is probably only a tiny part of the answer to these questions.

From an instrumental perspective, evaluating business plans and estimating risk seems difficult but in a straightforward way. I don't see what new insights it would offer to the rationality community, unless you could provide some case examples as an exercise in identifying bias.

I can see another direction you could go with this. A community of rationalists should "win". If winning implies developing a comparative advantage at something, and business tells us comparative advantage can be translated into money, then why not monetize on our comparative advantage (if it exists)? You could ask what these businesses would look like. But I suspect they look like businesses do already: e.g. Google has a more rational way of evaluating relevance, and has turned that comparative advantage into profit.

There have been a few posts recently to the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network lately about startups that want to hire programmers. You might want to check those out.

I have a few thoughts on startups. Let me know what you guys think:

1) People have commented that they are bad businessmen. "Business" isn't mysterious. Business is Like Chess. People tend to (at least implicitly) treat it as a barrier rather than an overcomable obstacle. (Paul Graham said he made this mistake of "being afraid of business".) If you're a rational person, you could read a few books, apply your rationality skills, and probably be a very competent businessman.

2) Startups are hard, but doable. Very doable. There are tons of things people want, and to generalize, it really just comes down to making something that people want. Sorry, I don't really know how to support this belief. It really just comes down to me believing that there are so many opportunities to start multi-million dollar businesses.

3) Startups are by far the best way to make a lot of money and contribute to the world (assuming that the value of money is rather inelastic). Way better than things like jobs in finance. This really comes down to what I said in 2), that they're doable and you have a high chance for success if you're rational. Also, even if you apply normal standards for chances of success (rather than my proposed standards that are much higher), it's still much better than things like jobs in finance. See this. The reason people choose safe jobs is because they are risk averse, but if you are mostly interested in doing good for the world, you wouldn't be so risk averse, and you'd choose startups because they have the highest expected value.

I'd like to be involved in a start-up. I'm don't know if I have the self-confidence to do it myself, though. Also, my ideas usually require capital or programming proficiency I don't have.