[nicoburns]

> Because you don't simply do it for the stuff. You do it for the brain juices which are released when you win.

Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards. We are talking here about the additional effect of financial incentives. IMO the possibility of making say $1m or $10m is pretty motivating if you don't have much. But once you reach say $1B, financial incentives are unlikely to be as relevant to you. You're made for life, why should you do anything you don't want to do.

> the worker dream job where you get paid for doing nothing.

I think most workers would prefer to be paid to something useful/meaningful, unless they can literally go and do something completely different with no restrictions. But is rarely how billionaire's failed projects go. They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

[GDC7]

> Well sure, but those motivations exist regardless of any financial rewards

The amount of the financial reward measures how much you are winning. The juices produced when you win 20$ and those produced when your leveraged long in biotech stocks make you 750k are not the same.

> They usually involve a lot of people working very hard to no end.

This is just a pessimistic outlook. Most stuff fails but the few thing that stick produce a big improvement.

And it's not just billionaires who face this problem. Government has an even worse success rate, but the home runs are paradigm shifts. The failures burn a lot, think about the CERN failure, that's 20B right there.

The ITER fusion seems to be the same thing and that's 50B

The ISS never recovered the initial investment made, that's 100B.

It's not just billionaires projects wasting money

[nicoburns]

All of those projects have something in common. They are big and centralised. I agree with you that it's not just billionaires that have this problem, but billionaires are one of the entities that do.

> The amount of the financial reward measures how much you are winning. The juices produced when you win 20$ and those produced when your leveraged long in biotech stocks make you 750k are not the same.

I suspect the world might a better place if we gave fewer people who are motivated in this financial manner, and more people who are motivated by the impact of their work (of whom there are plenty, and they're just as good as the financially motivated ones).

[GDC7]

> and more people who are motivated by the impact of their work (of whom there are plenty, and they're just as good as the financially motivated ones).

Nobody does the work for the sake of doing the work.

People work for a combination of financial reward and social status, and they'd use that as a metric to measure how much are they winning compared with the other 8 billion people on the planet

There is only a very very tiny percentage of people who are happy with just citations and the tepid approval of other academics

So if you roll back financial reward all the way down , then you have to pump social status all the way up.

It's going to be even worse. The cult of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Donald Trump would be the normal and would trickle all the way down.