[wolframhempel]

There's value in being early - in the right thing.

- If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return

- If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now

- If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush

Of course, you could just as well have

- become an ActionScript specialist as it was clearly the future of interactive web design

- specialized in Blackberry app development as one of the first mobile computing platforms

- made major investments in NFTs (any time, really...)

Bottom line - if you want to have a chance at outsized returns, but are also willing to accept the risks of dead ends, be early. If you want a smooth, mid-level return, wait it out...

[anticorporate]

There may be financial value in being early (if you're lucky), but there are other values in waiting.

My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about. I try to stay comfortable enough financially to have the luxury to make the decisions that allow me to keep doing things I care about when the opportunities come along.

Deciding whether something new is the right path for me usually takes a little time to assess where it's headed and what the impacts may be.

[0x3f]

> My goal in life is not to maximize financial return, it's to maximize my impact on things I care about.

In the vast majority of cases, financial returns help maximize your impact on the things you care about. Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants.

The only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way.

[anticorporate]

I knew this canned rebuttal was coming and almost addressed it in my previous comment.

I've not found this to be true at all, for a variety of reasons. One of my moral principles that extreme wealth accumulation by any individual is ultimately harmful to society, even for those who start with altruistic values. Money is power, and power corrupts.

Also, the further from my immediate circle I focus my impact on, the less certainty I have that my impact is achieving what I want it to. I've worked on global projects, and looking back at them those are the projects I'm least certain moved the needle in the direction I wanted them to. Not because they didn't achieve their goals, but because I'm not sure the goals at the outset actually had the long term impact I wanted them to. In fact, it's often due to precisely what we're talking about in this thread: sometimes new things come along and change everything.

The butterfly effect is just as real with altruism as it is with anything else.

[0x3f]

But you're not supposed to accumulate the wealth, you're supposed to forward it to your elected causes.

[anticorporate]

Being a quant is inherently accumulating and growing someone's wealth for them, even if it's not your own.

If there were a way to be a true Robin Hood and only extract wealth from the wealthy and redistribute that to poor, I'd call that a noble cause, although finance is not my field (nor is crime, for that matter) so it's not for me.

My chosen wealth multiplier is working at a community-owned cooperative, building the wealth for others directly.

[0x3f]

Not sure about this because many charities are designed to spend their income, rather than hoard it. A big part of choosing which charity to donate to is, or should be, how effective they are in spending what you give them.

[Devasta]

I want to cure lung cancer, therefore as an Effective Altruist™ I maximize my income by selling cigarettes to children outside playgrounds. The money will go towards research in my will, and in the meantime the incidence of lung cancer in teenagers will incentivize the free market to find a cure!

People don't become quants because they are EAs, they become EAs to justify to themselves why they became quants.

[0x3f]

Being a quant is not that interesting and if you're not redirecting the money you're not really an EA, are you?

Your first paragraph is just a standard response to utilitarianism, although a poor one because it doesn't consider EV.

Nonetheless I'm not quite sure why merely mentioning EA draws out all these irrelevant replies about it. It was incidental, not an endorsement of EA.

[ashwinsundar]

I didn't realize maximizing money is the way to achieve moral excellence. It's interesting how Puritanical the EA folks are

[0x3f]

There is no moral excellence but which you invent for yourself. But given the first principle or goal of 'having the most impact', maximizing money is often quite useful.

[ashwinsundar]

Or, utilitarianism

[komali2]

> Arguably in most cases it's more effective for you to provide the financing and direction but not be directly involved. That's why the EA guys are off beng quants.

The EA guys aren't the final word on ethics or a fulfilling life.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that one might, rather than seeking to always better one's life, instead seek to share the burden others are holding.

Making a bunch of money to turn around and spend on mosquito nets might seem to be making the world better, but on the other hand it also normalizes and enshrines the systems of oppression and injustice that created a world where someone can make 300,000$ a year typing "that didn't work, try again" into claude while someone else watches another family member die of malaria because they couldn't afford meds.

[0x3f]

Nobody is asking about ethics or a fulfilling life. We are talking about maximum _impact_.

[komali2]

Impact only has meaning per a chosen framework to measure within. For example, if I apply my ethical system to measure the impact of an EA, they have essentially no impact, since all they do is perpetuate a system that is the root of the problems they're trying to solve.

[Nasrudith]

To be frank that anti-system logic sounds a lot like. "Why are you taking a shower when there are people dying of thirst in a desert logic? Plumbing is an inherently unjust system for giving more water to those who already have enough!".

Yes there are flaws in the system, but smugly opting out of it and declaring yourself morally superior isn't helpful. Instead you need to actually do the work of understanding the system, its virtues and flaws before you can propose changes that would actually improve things.

[komali2]

Plumbing doesn't harm the people in the desert. Plumbing isn't an inherent bad.

The system of imperialism that enables some to starve while others eat is inherently bad and is propped up and legitimized when you act within its framework.

Adding plumbing to your house isn't saying "it's normal that people are dying of thirst." Structuring your impact around donations is, meanwhile, saying "though this system results in people starving while others throw away half their food, we can only solve these problems by working really hard within the rules this system defines, and then lending aid within the rules this system defines." After all, there's only one way to make money enough to be "impactful..."

This is a slightly tangential example, I don't want to be mistaken that I'm saying they're equivalent: Buying and freeing slaves is not a good form of activism when trying to overthrow slavery. It's doing the exact opposite: upholding the institution of slavery with every purchase. Legitimizing it and even in fact funding it. You tell yourself you're at least slightly reducing harm but in reality you're motivating slave catchers to go find more people to slave - and meanwhile btw you're doing nothing to address the fact that slave catchers in your own country are just grabbing the slaves you freed.

The only truly ethical choice for activism against slavery is to break chains and use violence against anyone that prevents you from breaking chains.

Again, not exactly equivalent, just an example of how "helping" can actually prop up the thing you think you're trying to take down.

[danny_codes]

> The only real exceptions are things that specifically require you personally, like investing time with your family, or developing yourself in some way.

So, the things that matter the most for most people?

Studies pretty consistently show that happiness caps off at relatively modest wealth.

[0x3f]

That's not their stated goal. Their stated goal is to maximize impact, not their own happiness.

[danny_codes]

Impact is nebulous. For example, Zuckerberg has had impact but it’s been almost entirely negative. The world is a worse place for him having existed.

[0x3f]

It being signed doesn't make it nebulous.

[lawtalkinghuman]

> That's why the EA guys are off beng quants.

Or in prison for fraud.

[jghn]

A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid.

I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!

[irusensei]

IMO the only way you'd be rich with bitcoin would be if you forget about your coins and reminded of it years later or if you were a hardcore "fix the money fix the world hodl" believer.

Otherwise you would most likely have sold during one of huge crashes or values, attempted trade and lost it all, invested into the new shitcoin NFT or whatever or just got hacked along the way.

[jghn]

indeed. even if I didn't lose them along the way or have them stolen via hack, I would have cashed out back when they were outlandishly priced at $100. I never would have held on to them this long.

But even $100 would have been nice given you could still pop them out for free on a standard PC back then with mining software.

[benhurmarcel]

You would probably have sold early for a relatively small amount too.

I bought 10ish BTC at some point for almost nothing, sold them for a low 4-digit amount thinking they were stupid anyway. I still think they were stupid but it turns out they could have paid off my house easily. Oh well.

[Cthulhu_]

Question is whether you sold all or just a segment. If you bought 100 btc early on, sold 99 of them, you'd still have something worth a deposit for a house or a car now, which is still life-changing.

[tartoran]

Or bought btc early on and forgot about it. Then haphazardly attenpting to find it on some old HD when the price skyrocketed.. There was a guy who combed through a trash landfill to recover a HD that presumably had dozens of millions in BTC

[irishcoffee]

I distinctly remember staring at my check/bank/debit card laying on the desk in front of my keyboard, all the info punched in to buy $500 of bitcoin for something like $0.29 a coin.

Didn't pull the trigger. I just tell myself I'd have sold them when they doubled in price or they'd have been hacked in one of the mt. gox attacks and I'd have lost them anyways.

Today it would be about 120m. Oh well.

[jghn]

Same. there's no chance I'd have the riches associated with those coins. Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night.

There was a local food delivery service at the time that accepted bitcoin. Can you imagine looking back on life and realizing you spent the equivalent of $1M on a burrito?

[cheevly]

My roommates and I literally bought a pizza with our stash of bitcoins. So yes, we fully understand how this feels.

[lostmsu]

> Or at least that's how I manage to sleep at night.

Admirable self-reflection.

[wolframhempel]

To be fair, I remember being about ten years old and berating my friend who just told me that he had something called "Rebel Assault" on a CD how this was completely impossible as CDs could only store music and how he was a complete idiot for believing otherwise... :-)

[not_a_bot_4sho]

Wow, shots fired here for me.

I was ahead of the game with my intimidate expertise in ActionaScript and Silverlight! I made 3D engines in browsers well before WebGL was a spec.

It was quite profitable for a few years, then poof. Dead end lol

[brailsafe]

Shockwave director studio even!?

I think these ideas are similar to long-term relationships. Identify when it's clear it's worth your time, like the author, and commit appropriately, and then when it's time to move on move on.

AngularJS, Backbone, Knockout, YUI, were all a wave of pretty groundbreaking frontend technology. It was absolutely worth experimenting with and committing to once they had some uptake, but probably not before then unless you wanted to work on the teams building them. Time went on, they had years of longevity that overlapped with the next wave of Vue, React, and the rest, and those became worth investing in long-term. Along the way, fundamentals in underlying web technologies were crucial, programming, logic, networking, markup, design.

Actionscript was totally worth investing in, until it ran it's course, and then other things came along and you would have adapted your game programming and engine programming skills yo a different platform.

[hakunin]

> If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return

Except you would've probably sold it at any of 1.5x, 2x, 4x, or 10x points. That's what people keep missing about this whole "early bitcoin". You couldn't tell it will 2x at 1.5x, you couldn't tell it will 4x at 2x, and so on.

[aleph_minus_one]

> - If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now

> - If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush

I disagree:

Concerning the first point: how neural networks are today is very different from how they were in former days. So, the knowledge of neural networks from the past does only very partially transfer to modern neural networks, and clearly does not make you a very sought-after specialist right now.

Concerning your second point: the success of mobile games is very marketing-centric. While it is plausible that being early in mobile games development when the iPhone was released might have opened doors in the game industry for you, I seriously doubt whether having this skill would have made you rich.

[imtringued]

There's also the problem that there is currently a huge transformer monoculture in the AI space. Everything gets better if you throw transformers at the problem.

If you had worked on anything other than a transformer based architecture post 2016, such as Mamba or RWKV, you would have wasted your time.

Mamba 3 is the third iteration and somehow I doubt that it will catch on.

[erikerikson]

I can confirm your response to the point you can first

[JumpCrisscross]

Almost everyone chasing those returns would be better off investing in index funds.

[aleph_minus_one]

Index funds give you something like the expected value over a huge class of possible investments.

What you aim for if you want to invest early is rather a probability distribution of

- get rich with a small (but nevertheless realistic) probability p

- get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little bit with probability 1-p

This is a very different offering than the profit probability distribution that index funds give you.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What you aim for if you want to invest early

Sure. I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index. Most new early-stage VCs do.

> get something between little, nothing, and loosing a little

Broadly speaking, when your investment outcomes don’t differentiate between anything and zero, you’re mostly going to get zero.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I’m saying someone pursuing that portfolio will probably end up underperforming an index.

This holds if you consider "underperforming" to be a comparison of expected values.

On the other hand, if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared, the index fund is the one that looses in the comparison.

[JumpCrisscross]

> if you consider "probability of getting a really huge payoff" to be the measure by which the investments are compared

That’s gambling. You’re truncating the curve below the top. It’s a terrific strategy for middlemen. Its expected value is lower than index investing.

[mahemm]

Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? If not, I'd be curious to hear what is different in that for you.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino?

I wouldn't "invest" in lottery tickets because for these p is far too small (exception: if I found a loophole in the system of the lottery, which has been found for some lotteries). For casinos, there is additionally the very important aspect that the casino will scam you (if you start winning money (for example by having found some clever strategy that gives you an advantage), the security will escort you out of the building and ban you from entering the casino again).

So, to give an explanation of the differences:

- Because "the typical run" for such an investment will be loosing, you should never invest your whole net worth (or a significant fraction thereof) into such an investment. The advice that I personally often give is to use index funds or stock investments for generating the money for investments that are much more risky, but have huge possible payouts.

- You should only do such an "early investment" if you have a significant information advantage over the average person. Such an advantage is plausible, for example, if you are deeply interested in technology topics

- Lottery tickets have an insanely small p (as defined in my comment). You only do "early investments" into topics where the p is still small, but not absurdly bad. The difference is that for lottery tickets the p is basically well-known. On the other hand, for "early investments", people can only estimate the p. Because of your information advantage from the previous point, you can estimate the p much better than other people, which gains you a strong advantage in picking the right "early investments" to choose.

But be aware that this is a strategy for risk-affine people. If you aren't, you better stay, for example, with index funds.

[jayd16]

Sure, you could take calculated risks for predictable returns over a long enough time scale.

Or you could take what's in the box!!

[JumpCrisscross]

Only if it’s leveraged.

[rdiddly]

Crucially those are all investments. Just like creating AI or buying data centers to run AI is an investment. Whereas merely using AI feels more like being in the general population of consumers. The shape of the outlay for it is un-investment-like. A monetary investment is a big charge up front, not a monthly fee. A skills investment looks like effort spent learning, but I mean how difficult is it to type reasonably precise English? Conclusion: you're a customer, not an investor, so you can start any time.

[bombcar]

Some of those things involve a bit of money as a gamble; others require some time learning tooling that can be repurposed (mobile game developers can obviously do mobile apps), and others would be dedicating years of your life into something that may be a dead end.

[koonsolo]

I get what you are saying, but as someone who was coding mobile apps in 2003 (iPhone was released in 2007), I have to give a few details.

By the time iPhone was released, it was already too late for small companies. When you developed apps and games for MS PocketPC and Blackberry, you charged $20 per app, and any average quality product would make money.

In 2007, there were only 2 kinds of success stories:

1. Companies that were able to throw a lot of money around (Your example of Candy Crush).

2. Some rare flukes of someone getting rich with some app.

So what I was trying to say: The golden days were really before the release of the iPhone.

[fermentation]

There's really no need to be "early" for something like this. I've seen coworkers who've never used agentic coding pick it up and know everything that need to in ~2 days. The people who really dive in and are running orchestrated agents overnight are in general not building much of real value.

[mock-possum]

In all fairness I was an actionscript specialist, and up until 2010 or so I was making REAL good money doing contract flash work -

Luckily I was also doing frontend work alongside, so when the time came to transition to html+css+javascript, it wasn’t much of a move at all, it was just putting down AS and focusing fully on JS

[demaga]

None of those examples are useful.

1. 2016 was years after Bitcoin was developed. So you could still make 200x returns without being early adopter.

2. Is this even true? I'd bet scraping experts or people who can fine tune LLMs have easier time finding a job than classical ML academics.

3. Candy Crash was released when iPhone was on its 5th iteration.

If anything, you just added to OPs points. Being an early adopter gives limited advantage.

[Quarrelsome]

to be fair a friend of mine made one of the first flashlight apps on iOs and made a tidy sum out of it.

I think the question really is about how well you hit your timings. You can have held bitcoin but sold it went it hit $5k or less. You can have a technical advantage in a given field but somehow waste it (dead startup, serious illness) and lose your timing. Nobody knows what the right timings are, but I think the OP is pushing for a more consistent risk investment strategy and setting up the timings to raise the floor significantly at the cost of losing some of the best possible ceilings.

[ivm]

FWIW I easily moved from ActionScript game development for Facebook to Objective-C game development for iPhone, riding both hype waves as a result. So, it was a decent tech pick in 2007-2009.

[rob]

I should've started registering a bunch of two and three character and generic .com domains in the early 90s when registration was free.