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by lanstin 495 days ago
You can see it just here - Paul Graham made money making a web store in the 1990s (which I can tell you wasn't that hard), then investing his money in a bunch of internet startup (a bit rarer, but I feel like a large percentage of the people that wanted to be rich and had 1 start-up success in the 1990s succeeded); he regards this as equivalent to inventing the standard model of particle physics or inventing the mRNA vaccines, rather than a reasonable capable person at a very lucky time to be good at programming.

Andreesson has the same blindness - he wrote the first web browsers (having not invented HTTP or the web or browsers) and parleyed that into a fortune by investing. I guess he's a skilled investor, a smart financial person, but there is no evidence that he has some special science expertise or extraordinary intelligence. From my observations, one can understand nothing about science or the physical world and do well with software and investing.

As far as "far-sighted," the history from 1980 onwards is the destruction of many things in society devoted to the long view in favor of short-term financialization.