Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're one of the smartest people in the world, working in one of the most impactful areas... the posterior probability is more like 90% than near-zero.
Depends- for example, duirng the time that Google started up, I was in grad school with a great deal of support for starting biotech companies, but when I looked... even the geniuses were struggling because at the time, biotech companies could take a decade or more to be profitable or fail. It was clear, as we were exiting the late 90s dot com crash that the economy and money for tech was going to come back, and comp…
I don't think at that time biotech could be considered very impactful. After all, search engines were literally impacting billions of peoples' lives within a few years, but a new drug would take a decade to get to market, and impact "only" millions of people.