You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World

http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/13/nicholas-taleb-prediction-tech-future07-cx_nt_1015change.html?feed=rss_news

by keaneu • 19 years ago

28 20 19 years ago

Good quotes:

"...[people] cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another."

"We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination."

naivehs• 19 years ago

"The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design."

pg2• 19 years ago

And yet that's exactly the business we're in. I just stopped in to check Hacker News before getting on with reading applications, which consists of trying to predict who will change the world, and the top story is that one can't.

I agree with this essay, but I don't think the title is quite right. All the people who've changed the world have been energetic and determined. So you can to some extent predict by recognizing those qualities. You can predict the people, just not what the ideas will turn out to be. The title should have been "You can't predict how the world will change."

davidw2• 19 years ago

You still can't predict just who, out of a reasonably large pool of energetic and determined people, will be the ones with the really big payoffs (for whatever definition of payoff, be it monetary, a big discovery or whatever).

You can probably say with some degree of certainty, which people won't do anything big. That might still leave a pretty large group of people, though.

Who else thinks it would be a lot of fun to see a Graham-Taleb debate on startups? In the end, I think he'd probably like what YC does, because you're giving some people the freedom to "tinker" full time, along with the support to take advantage of the tinkering if it produces something cool. Given a non-infinite supply of money and attention time, of course you're going to have to pick and choose who gets those things. I wonder if he would suggest any changes to the format?

mattmccor• 19 years ago

One paradox is that a failure at the right point in time may give one the motivation they need to succeed.

For example, a person applies to YC. They get rejected and use that as incredible motivation to succeed in spite of that. If they had been selected, would they still have had that motivation?

Alex3917• 19 years ago

Taleb actually says something similar in his answer to the 2007 Edge question:

"The only bad news is that we can't really tell where the good news are going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers."

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_5.html#taleb

The Forbes article is basically just the edge answer minus a few paragraphs, although sadly the paragraphs that got cut were the ones that would probably be most interesting to YC types.

akkartik• 19 years ago

Trevor Blackwell calls it tweakability. http://tlb.org/busywork.html

brlewis• 19 years ago

Moreover, the extent to which you predict who the world-changers will be does not have to be great.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...

One reason that applicants should not take rejection personally is that YC would be wasting time trying to evaluate them with 100% accuracy.

kul• 19 years ago

Hmm, I'd guess it's harder than that. Being energetic and determined may be a necessary condition to change the world but it is not a sufficient condition. There are plenty of energetic and determined people who won't change the world.

Though, as far as one can predict, I bet determination is the best indicator we can hope for.

pg2• 19 years ago

I didn't mean to imply that we can predict perfectly. No one could, since luck is a factor. But we can narrow the field.

jkush• 19 years ago

For founders, a more inspiring title might be "You can't predict how you'll change the world."

xxxx• 19 years ago

> All the people who've changed the world have been energetic and determined.

I'm not so sure about this. I'd rather like to think: All the people who have taken credit for stuff that has changed the word have been energetic and determined.

hga• 19 years ago

"Random tinkering is the path to success."

This is of course why we're all using a neighborhood DC power station provided by Edison Electric.

Nope, sorry, "random tinkering" will get you only so far.

Not so random tinkering can get you farther, it's no accident that about the most popular handgun design in the USA was made by John Browning (the greatest firearms design genius in history) and adopted by the US Army in 1911 (!). (We're also still using his M2 .50 cal machine gun with no real need to replace it, just as there was no real reason to replace the M1911.)

But if you combine "random tinkering" with "European math" (i.e. Tesla and the polyphase AC that Edison could not do the math for), now, there you really have something.

When I read some histories of the founding concepts of MIT, it was very clear they desired to meld these two powerful themes into something new, the motto Mens et Manus (Mind and Hand) and the seal expressing this quite clearly.

And while I understand that a lot of you all who are focused on a niche that richly rewards "random tinkering" don't think there's much value add to e.g. the sorts of engineers that MIT turns out, I submit to you that you wouldn't be here unless you were standing on the shoulders of the people who produced artifacts like the transistor, the IC and TCP/IP (and maybe even ACID databases :-), none of which were pure "random tinkering".

To recast this a bit, maybe look at it through Clayton Christensen's lens:

The transistor, IC and TCP/IP were all sustaining innovations, replacing the tube, mechanically integrated modules and previous networking systems respectively. Each dropped right into the place of their predecessors with the usual teething pains, but represented qualitative improvements that in a while were game changers.

What you are doing is disruptive innovation at its finest (read The Innovator's Dilemma for the full treatment).

There's a place for both, but I believe that while what one is working on might strongly emphasize one or the other, one should be reasonably grounded in both.

Otherwise you might find your lunch eaten by a disruptive innovation, or hit a brick wall when you're in the sustaining axis and e.g. something doesn't scale in an important way.

(And I thank keaneu for reminding why I dropped my subscription to Forbes a long time ago (before SCO vs. The World). :-)

davidw2• 19 years ago

I don't think he's saying to just take a bumble-along happy go lucky approach, with no rigor, training or mental discipline, but that you can't "sit down and invent things" most of the time. Sure, you can point yourself in a direction, but even then, you have to try, fiddle, experiment, and calibrate as you go along, and you might even then arrive somewhere that you didn't set out to go, if you're well placed to grab opportunities.

alaskamiller• 19 years ago

<3 50 cal, slammed the bolt onto my hands a couple of times. Thanks, Browning!

samson• 19 years ago

I hope an occult style following does not develop for this book. Much of what he says in his book can be learned by going through David Hume's essay a "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" which is widely available and surprisingly to say, an easier read then Taleb book.

As for this article the only interesting thing said to was "Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor". I agree with this because economist have this notion that theory comes before practice. Often you will see abstract mathematical theories developed first, then secondly attempts to execute then in the world afterwards. Common sense should tell anyone it is the other way around.Successful execution preceeds any good theory.

This is essentially Taleb's point about trial and error, though if you follow that point religiously you end up adopting the concept that theories are of no worth at all, since everything can be reduced down to luck.

In the end even if that maybe true, I still think the idea of things being reducable to luck is a wrong way to approach the challenges that you will face with life. You start to say after this startup failed..."well i was just unlucky", when in fact you should reflect and make sense of your mistakes, rather then just playing it down to some mysterious luck hypothesis that you had no way of influencing.

DanielBMarkham• 19 years ago

This is good.

There is a role for randomness in every effort, but it needs to be understood. There was another article on the list today about failing a lot to succeed. Dedication and a great team will always overcome, but they will overcome only if they fail quickly and explore the chaos and randomness of the problem domain. At the risk of link-spamming, I wrote in my blog this morning about the role that divergent thinking has on social networks. http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/10/do_you_want_m... I think Paul and others make the same point in regards to how it's better to be in the valley than in Deluth -- you can harness the randomness better there.

As hackers and analytical people, we've been brought up to feel like we should take a direct path from point A to point B. But it never works like that in the real world. Good solution-based thinking is divergent, and understands and accepts that you're not following a recipe as much as you're playing a game of chance -- but playing very cleverly!

edw519• 19 years ago

There were so many times when I started a project with certain intent and the final product was very different from what I had planned. Sometimes the product was simply me - the person who I became through the process was now able to take on many new things.

vegashacker• 19 years ago

dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24318

fleddermaus• 19 years ago

Yah, who would have thought that a guy in the 1920's would write a master thesis suggesting the idea that you could transfer information electronically in 1's and 0's (claude E. Shannon).

What I find more interesting is that it wasn't the idea that took time to develop, but the technology. Without people dreaming and working on ideas, we wouldn't be where we are. The beauty of the night sky lies in the constellations, not the indivdiual stars. If there was only one star, we'd get bored, but individuals stars are fun to look at because they increase the total beauty of the constellation.

So, if you want to change the world, shine like a star and belong to a constellation.

The allure of a small business is that it is not entrenched in keeping the status quo, but excitedly endeavoring to ask the next big question, "why the hell not?"

You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World

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