Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
This week in Gell-Mann Amnesia https://i.imgur.com/JVyDZQC.png
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timdaub
@timdaub.eth
The thing is, you cannot expect Sacks, a lucker than won the Monte Carlo simulation, to understand how chance works within a population. If he accepted that, he‘d be aware that he contributed nothing to where he‘s at in his life.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Sacks helped build PayPal (among other things)?
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timdaub
@timdaub.eth
that means nothing in Taleb‘s frame. And also, as you like to say: we can‘t rerun history to produce the counterfactuals. What if he didn‘t get to build PayPal? Would he be equally successful and attributed for it? Or was he just lucky?
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
Most progress in society comes from reasonably good approximations made by people in the arena, not perfectly verifiable truths. A much simpler rule of thumb to apply here — don’t take advice about building successful businesses from a man who has only failed at it
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timdaub
@timdaub.eth
that‘s fine. But success is still a lottery despite the greatness of the local decision quality. There are brilliant people that never had any success
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
There is a great deal of luck involved in success, but also a tremendous amount of hard work and discipline. Outsized success does not come form luck alone.
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timdaub
@timdaub.eth
agreed. Still, if people say „we should listen to Sacks because he founded PayPal and knows all the tricks,“ why aren‘t they saying „we should listen to TimDaub, he worked many years in startups and never got a hit! he knows all the mistakes“
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