antifragile

Hmmm :-) :-) This is a GREAT opportunity to dispel myths & confirm truths

What Zucka said, I'm presuming he did, but haven't checked, has truths & flaws all at the same time. Actually it matters little who said it. This is a great discourse potential. Indeed, I've said similar things in the past,probably way more stupid. What this demonstrates is your IQ to the world, albeit at a singular point in time. But the world is an unforgiving place, & the bigger they are the harder they fall. Reasonable we can assume that the numbers wanting to have a dig at you increases in a power-law-like manner, the `bigger´ you are and the more you say; if he'd thrown the word `women´ in there somewhere, it would have gone-up so much he could have been literally toasted, maybe even contract kill from some nutter. Still, it doesn't demean my respect of him, we all have stupid off-days. One has to look at the (verbal + doing) batting average, but I agree if the verbal average per se is low but it's best not to speak! Question is, are you prepared to cast the first stone? I'm not, 'cause I screw-up constantly. I've tripped over so many of my biases, I'm biased that I've biases.

As for me, I'm 45. Anyhow, that's what it says on my passport, but I don't believe it 'cause I still feel 12 on the inside. Moreover, I consider myself faster, more efficient, more clued-in & way smarter than I ever was. Physically, I was a former multiple WR in deep-sea freediver, but I can still do what I did way back when. So what gives? Secretly I'm running nature's `smart pills´. Want some?

Anyhow, back to the story. Innovation is not so much about IQ (I know plenty of `box-tickers´ with IQ of +140). But it takes more than IQ & speed. BIG innovation, which is or should really be the name of the game, requires MQ (= CQ + IQ) (C, for creativity & perspective-shifting, M, moonshot). Most people under 30 still have a deluded self-centered view of the universe (even secretly) which makes this incessant sense of self-centeredness difficult to allow for any majorly significant perspective-shifts to do 0 to 1. On the other hand, the `program´ in `old dogs´ is also pretty entrenched, which makes the field fairly level.

One last thing: I actually, paradoxically, agree with him(!), i.e., if you're doing incremental or `me too´ innovation, bu not if you're looking to do or invest in real-world (i.e., physical) moonshot innovation, of the type that will magically defy steadfast & age-old laws of nature, not the 140 characters stuff. Sure 140 characters will make money, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking altering the real fabric of reality & your existence. In this extraterrestrial landscape the brain-strain & the chasm of difference is so deep & wide (think Mars' Valles Marineris vs. Grand-Canyon) that there simply ain't no way, no how you're going to generate or process, say, condense, the broad based & deep knowledge required to go from 0 to 1 in a short time. It can happen, but then we're talking about a special type of person (another conversation for another time perhaps). I'm talking about the BIG opportunities, the stuff that exists at the intersection of fields & which require really deep, sometimes life-long domain knowledge acquisition; the stuff of Newton, Galileo, Da Vinci, Taleb, & Co.). Some evidence for this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2013/09/11/peter-thi...

Peter's experiment wasn't the program per se, it was the young- & smart-guns lack of really deep & really broad basic fundamental education (self imposed or otherwise) that requires more time than going from kindy to even college, where by enlarge you're made to jump through pointless hoops over & over again, ad nauseum. No doubt, there is an education problem & a hack in the waiting. The problem with his approach was that it takes time for flowers to blossom, & to paraphrase Taleb:

“I’d rather be dumb & antifragile [i.e., old & experienced] than extremely smart & fragile [i.e., young & inexperienced], any time.” - Taleb (2012)

The bottom-line: risk saying or doing nothing & the outcome is certain: nothing. The trick is to have a willingness to alter your position if demonstrably shown to be wrong, 'cause that'll certainly boost your IQ, & most notably. All good!

Appreciate the heads-up.

Whenever I see such BIG and over the horizon forecasts I'm instantly dubious for at least two reasons: - Lots of Black Swans can circle and cross reality in short amounts of time. - Global averages don't count for much if localized, extreme concentrations exists that swing towards depleting and /or insufficient resources.

The myth is not the myth of the pop. explosion, it's the myth of yet more BIG forecasts!

This is a quick 101 `shallow dive´ into on moonshots, if you're one of those BIG thinking types, but with feet firmly planted in reality. Part 2, forthcoming early next week, is my base template to hack, tackle, assault such innovation, & with biotech examples from my experience, but you could modify to your chew, whatever the flavor, I suppose.

One makes money to make a living, but you only truly enrich your life if you share some of what you have .... there is no other way, everything else is delusion. I know, I tried hard the other way.

Hmm. Sounds like someone whose tripped-over their own super ego. We must help him! Everyone get out! I'm going to call in for a tsunami to re-level the playing-field :-)

I don't believe it's possible to tackle the gatekeeper or incumbents and win. You have to bypass them altogether before revisiting them. You have to, in Bill Gurley's words, have an orthogonal solution to the problem. My words, you have to be 100% disruptive. Or, you seek fast-track, accelerated approval, breakthrough therapy, and/or priority review, but then you will likely come across and have to compete against the incumbents, who've by the way woken-up on the orphan disease problem too. Truth is, we have bigger problems than orphan diseases in the world. Biotech startups should be tackling major diseases and focusing on transformative innovation, by questions the fundamentals.

Categorically, yes. But, you're only likely to succeed if you for one, question the fundamental assumptions on which things are built. Anything less is incremental, or so far down-track in clinical trialing that it wont get funded or wouldn't be sufficient, respectively). Questioning assumptions is fairly straight-forward because so much out there is high quality but seriously questionable bull. Not seeking to cast derisions, just that biology, by its very organic nature, is volatile and often uncooperative. The problem of course is that now we are talking about obtaining deep-domain knowledge, which can take some time, absolute minimum 5 years to read everything, condense and connect-the missing dots. My project, for example, has taken me literally a dozen years, in part, because I hadn't realized I'd started!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-... Accessed 28/04

True, 'cause one drug for one condition now costs $4-12B, because the success rate is < 0.02%. There needs to be multi-functionality in our innovative efforts when we experiencing such high rates of disruption, say, extinctions.

I feel an interesting and charged buzz around this thread, so though to join in.

Things appear hard and severely constrained because we habitually fall into the trap of thinking linearly and incrementally, as opposed to, at least sometimes, multi-linearly and in bounds, by perspective shifting. To do that one has to question the fundamental assumptions of which this linear trajectory were founded on. More often than not, one finds that much of what is considered so is merely based on someone', usually a group's very convincing, albeit not necessarily correct narrative.

Such vision. Good luck to you. Otherwise, maybe I'll have a cool job for you. :-)

Being a biotech is not a fundamental constraint unless you approach healthcare orthogonally. We already know that the BIG Pharma R&D model is broken and irrational. Actually words expressed by Merk late last year, as Well as Voltaire in the 1700s! To hack healthcare you must, at least initially, by-pass the gate-keepers, the incumbents, and they're lobbyists by targeting unregulated markets, ideally Golidlocks markets. That's my strategy anyhow.Regarding multi-million dollar costs, people must strain their brains some by doing design-arounds and using surrogate markers and collaborating, i.e., perspective shifting by questions fundamental assumptions. In fact, it is possible to run experiments at 2 orders of magnitude less than what establishment-heavies are doing theirs (speaking from experience).