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Having the courage to try stuff out is the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' problem we face
People think it's taxation or CO2 emissions driving climate change, but they are such a tiny fraction of the lack of courage problem.
Because in the end that's how progress happens, a bunch of people trying so many different approaches and statistically one of them sticks, then everybody copies and adopts that...and that's how truly big leap forward are made (in the capitalistic sense)
I am convinced that it should be nature to kill business idas and economic ideas, the brain should not do any triage.
Instead we triage more than ever because all we care about is the prize of the monetary compensation and associated climbing of the social ladder . It is truly a tragedy of the commons because if we collectively decided to try and take on our ideas , then the amount of quality of life unleashed by the successful ones would make what we today consider "striking it rich" pale in comparison.
We are all guilty of it.
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.
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.
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.
I recently read the book "Bourgeois Dignity" by Dierdre McCloskey, and it makes a somewhat similar argument backed up by serious historical research. The thesis of the book is that the respectability of inventing, doing business, "getting rich" etc is what has enabled standards of living to greatly exceed the historical (Malthusian) norm.
McCloskey talks about hope and courage (and not just "mere prudence") making a big difference, enabled by an encouraging culture rather than an elitist or fatalistic one. I think that it rhymes with your idea that "the brain should not do any triage" (if at a different scale -- social, rather than personal.) Your idea that the freedom to innovate throws off positive externalities is a core part of the argument.
I enjoyed the book a lot, and recommend it. It's a knife-fight from start to finish, but fun and funny and wide-ranging, worth reading just for the tour of its bibliography even if you don't like the thesis.
This strikes me as a very likely theory. Once people have their basic needs met, a huge part of what they end up spending their money on is essentially social status. This societal strategy cuts out the middleman and just awards social status directly. It's also often been remarked that, for example, Silicon Valley is very lenient in terms of social status on people with failed startups. Conversely, in Germany, for example, a failed business is often considered a black mark socially, and you correspondingly see far lower start rates for high risk businesses.
Most people feel that doing the same thing that other people do, or enforcing that other people must do the same thing that you do, are the highest goals you could pursue.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/09/the-world-forager-eli...
Responding to the post you linked, I notice this all the time with corporate policies. If a property management company adds a new kind of qualification to get an apartment, that didn’t exist 10 years ago, soon every company has it. If an insurance company starts using a third party to verify your information, soon they’re all doing it. So bars to meet basic needs get higher, and you can’t get around it by shopping around or moving to another city. Or not for long.
Asch confomrity experiments are fascinating.
Almost 40% of the experimentees would go along with anything the group did even if it was clearly wrong.
Asch's numbers were off according to confirmations - it's different among age groups, gender and cultures - the effect is still significant and important, but can be escaped with enough work it seems.
For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22044061/
Oh I'm sure there's a lot more fine grained data and that Asch's experiments were a rough prototype for future experiments.
Asch was interesting to me because he showed that a significant proportion of the population would just go along with ANYTHING the group did.
This has a lot of implications.
A lot of advertisements use this technique to try to position their product in the ad as a 'mainstream' and 'normal' product that them majority loves even if it's a stick of cancer that will kill you.
If propaganda can infect enough people, then many others will just cave and quit critically thinking and go along with the majority.
It's just fascinating to me how many people will just cave to the majority to fit in.
Why does nobody make an index fund of penny stocks? I ask rhetorically, because I tried it in a stock market game that used real data, years ago, and kept it up for several years. But garbage is garbage, whatever people say about market efficiency.
There's a big difference between saying "we need to try 1000 things to find the one that works" and saying "if we try 1000 things, there will be one that works".
Hedge funds like this exist actually. However, they tend to crash as hard as the companies they fund in any market swing.
There are funds of micro-cap stocks; I'm not sure if any have been really successful, but that's not quite the same thing as penny stocks, even though there is overlap.
> Having the courage to try stuff out is the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' problem we face
In capitalist economies, entrepreneurship (courage) historically is the biggest driver of job growth and innovation. It is based on competition in an open market.
There is no shortage of risk taking currently, if a proxy for risk taking is the an abundance of VC money flowing into businesses with growth but no profits. I have doubts on whether businesses taking VC money qualify as entrepreneurship though. I have the impression that banks loan to VC's much more freely than to actual entrepreneurs.
> if we collectively decided to try and take on our ideas , then the amount of quality of life unleashed by the successful ones would make what we today consider "striking it rich" pale in comparison
This is the China collectivism approach to capitalism and there is arguably way more cronyism and oppression in the regime in comparison. The government is more directly picking winners and losers.
However in western capitalist economies, the free market died in 2008 when the housing market crashed. From then on, the government is saying, "everyone is a winner" by pumping so much liquidity into the market.
> We are all guilty of it.
Guilty of what? Accepting the numbing effects of faux wealth? Propping up businesses of people "in on the know" to save jobs, when entrepreneurship is already a proven job creation engine?
There is an unprecedented flow of monetary supply going into the global economy, and we are well overdue for an actual recession because recessions have been demonized and politicized and avoided, when they are necessary to purge the froth and inefficiency in the economy.
A very small percentage of people can afford to take those risks. Whether their venture has merit or not is orthogonal to that.
Paraphrasing Alan Kay (I think): What if the next Einstein is born in precarious socioeconomic circumstances with little access to education and sufficient time and resources?
And there are not only the young Einsteins but also plenty of smart, hard working people that are exhausted of wage labor and live paycheck to paycheck. They would gladly take things in their own hands, but they cannot risk their lives.
Capitalism and the free market would be so great, if people could actually participate.
> Capitalism and the free market would be so great, if people could actually participate.
Agree. Public healthcare and education would go a long way into enabling everyone to participate more freely. Instead we footgun ourselves into projecting the "pick yourself up by the bootstraps" mindset onto others, which just doesn't work unless everyone has boots.
The conformists don’t want you doing anything new. They (and everyone who is generally conservative - in the adjective sense, not the political sense) don’t want things to change.
The world you’re talking about is undesirable to them.
I'm not sure whether you replied on the wrong discussion or were replying just to the title, but the post is an interesting discussion/profile about Albert O. Hirschman (forgotten economist and author of "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" etc).
“Hirschman didn’t wait for intellectual exile: he proudly gathered up his followers and led them into the wilderness himself. Unfortunately, they perished there.” — Paul Krugman quoted in the article.
Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty (on the choice between leaving and speaking up, influenced by loyalty) has also been hugely influential. The article was a nice read.