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d_burfoot 7 hours ago

There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.

If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.

The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.

groundzeros2015 7 hours ago | parent [-]

True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences.

One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.

astura 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk.

Disagree completely that becoming a doctor is low risk. The amount of residency spots is capped and is smaller than the number of people graduating from medical school. Every year thousands of MDs are prevented from going to residency and thus prevented from practicing medicine, even though they graduated from medical school.

https://dailyorange.com/2026/03/opinion-amid-u-s-doctor-shor...

>In 2025, 9,541 applicants went unmatched, including 2,409 soon-to-be graduates of United States schools awarding Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.

groundzeros2015 an hour ago | parent [-]

Compared to what? Every other high status high paying career has less defined criteria for success. Where else can I sign up for a program to make 500k?

You just have to do well in medical school (an artificial program with stated requirements) and you’ll make it.

Are the career outcomes for those with medical degrees bad? Don’t they have a ton to options? What’s the risk?