Wei Dai on the lonely economics of long-horizon strategy: you're only paid for being early
DavidDuvenaud · x · 2026-09-05
Wei Dai (retweeted by David Duvenaud) argues that long-horizon strategists spend most of their time at low status for obsessing over things nobody cares about — and can only be rewarded for being early, never for the details of their strategies, which remain unevaluable even now.
He asks whether the early EA/rationalist obsession with AI safety actually improved the situation, and how credit should be split — prompted by David Shor's note that EAs obsessed with pandemics and AI in the mid-2010s were dismissed as crazy until both happened.
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