You Should Be Making More Good Bets

+EV is powerful.

I don’t think most people make enough good bets.

Neel Nanda, a famous mechanistic interpretability researcher, wrote about this on his blog here, but I wanted to explore the topic a little bit further.

In general, once someone is sufficiently “intelligent, hard-working, diligent, and so on” the disparities in outcomes you see in the world come from bets.

It’s not possible to work a thousand times harder than another person, but if you, say, catch a technology wave at the right time then you can have a thousand times more leverage.

So, given this, if you’re smart and ambitious, you should be trying to increase the variance of your outcomes in general.

This sounds obvious, but not everything is a contrarian secret or needs to be so complicated.

Writing is a good way of increasing the variance in your life.

I’ve been continually surprised over the years how many people I’ve never met have read my work.

So you should probably be writing more.

Obvious, but correct.

Trying to meet as many smart, interesting people as you can also tends to have this effect.

Just when I think I know a lot about the world, I realize how very, very little I actually do.

I don’t think that ever ends.

Obvious, but correct.