[HN Gopher] Success stories are just propaganda (2017) ___________________________________________________________________ Success stories are just propaganda (2017) Author : paulpauper Score : 126 points Date : 2022-07-15 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.martinweigel.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.martinweigel.org) | fictionfuture wrote: | There is a worthwhile premise behind the title of this article. | Success stories are generally fluff designed to rewrite history | and control a desired narrative. | | Most the real reasons for success are taboo, boring and too | technical to talk about, e.g. "we got massive SEO traffic through | user-generated content and 10x'd traffic in 2 months".. | f17 wrote: | Or, "I'm fully self-made. All I had was an introduction to the | CEO of Sequoia by my father who happens to be a Senator and a | small zero-interest loan, barely a million dollars." | codalan wrote: | The struggle is real | AQuantized wrote: | Funny that your example sounds like a stereotypical self- | congratulatory Hacker News article | smartplaya2001 wrote: | Can you go a little more into success being taboo? This is | quite interesting but I am not sure if we are thinking the same | thing. | davesque wrote: | Maybe the moral of the story is to never allow yourself to wallow | in self doubt because you don't measure up to any given success | story. On the other hand, _do_ allow yourself to use an inspiring | success story to spur you into action when the time is right. | | Maybe this is just moving the goal posts. After all, it seems to | imply that there is some unknown mechanism at play that guides a | person into a moment of opportunity. The question then becomes, | "What is the nature of that process?" As far as that goes, I'm | sympathetic to the idea that a lot of it just comes down to dumb | luck. However, to me that's more a reason to just take a deep | breath once in a while and quit freaking out than to throw up my | hands and declare, "It's all fate and I have no control!" | | To put it another way, you can still take some general wisdom | from advice about success (as opposed to failure). Just don't | take it too seriously. Use it to give yourself a little mental | space once in while but otherwise try not to burn too many | calories pondering it. | csours wrote: | I've read about many many failures. Every failure is instructive. | But avoiding failure is not the same as success. | | I agree that when someone is telling you a success story, they | usually have an agenda, and that someone else's path to success | won't be your path. | | Look for contingent advice - advice that matches your scenario | and tells you when it does and does not apply. | bjourne wrote: | For some evidence proving Martin Weigel right, see the BBC show | Dragon's Den. Fix rich, self-righteous turds who think they are | self-made billionaires bet on business ideas entrepreneurs pitch | them. They never bet on the winners and frequently bet on losers. | Literally millions of people could do the job better than them | but where not lucky enough to get right. The best product ever | pitched on the show was the Tangle Teezer which those business | geniuses unanimously trashed: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2O0SvrlFKA | paulpauper wrote: | Survivorship bias seems to play a huge role in VC too. A handful | of individuals and firms got mega-rich with Facebook and then | later with Uber, and now they are held up as these huge geniuses. | However, this is more luck than skill, because all oof their | later investments have done much worse, so excluding Facebook and | Uber, they are not so skilled. Now these same geniuses are hyping | crypto , which has been a total disaster for half of 2021 and all | 2022. Same for Softbank, which had a big winner with Ali Baba, | but pretty much failed massively with later bets. Successes have | many mothers, failure is an orphan, as it's said. | jollybean wrote: | I believe the logic of VC investing is misplaced here. | | That their subsequent investments did worse than FB is not | evidence of anything at all really. | | In particular, almost all VC fund returns are weighted towards | a few big winners, some ok winners, a bunch of zombies and a | lot of failures. | | There is a 'FB' in every successful VC fund. | | Most VC just didn't just magically appear as VCs and then | magically/luckily invest in FB. It was a long path for most of | those funds and individuals. | | There is luck involved, surely, which is why funds have a lot | of companies in their portfolio. | pessimizer wrote: | > There is a 'FB' in every successful VC fund. | | Tautologically. There isn't a facebook in any failing VC | fund. So it's really unnecessary to talk about VC strategies | at all if you're going to define a successful strategy as | having once invested in some whale early and ignore all of | the other failures, it's sufficient to just ask for a list of | the investors in things that did well and declare them | shrewd. | yomkippur wrote: | But why is it that some VC are clearly better at this dice | rolling? ex. Sequoia | | Again and again they seem to be able to discover these home | runs or is it that they are able to use their vast network of | influence to manufacture success? | | It all reminds me of poker. High stacks | dictate/influence/restricts other participants with less | stacks. | jollybean wrote: | ? | | Because it's not 'dice rolling'. | | And yes, they will use their network to create good | outcomes, that's fine. | azemetre wrote: | It could be evidence that the idea of VCs may not be a | reliable way of investing. | | Nassim Taleb stated that in 2009, within an 18 month window, | banking industry lost all the profits it ever made since the | beginning of banking as an industry. | | Such a catastrophic event isn't out of the question for VC | either. | [deleted] | dandelany wrote: | This. I always get annoyed when entrepreneurs eg. on Shark Tank | say things like "I quit my job, took out two mortgages on my | home, maxed out my credit cards and spent my kids' college fund | on the business. And look at us now, we're making millions of | dollars a year! Don't give up when failure looks inevitable!" | | Probably most of the people who follow this advice to the | letter end up financially ruined, they just don't get a public | platform to talk about it... | gerdesj wrote: | Quite. I think Shark Tank is what we call Dragon's Den in the | UK (bunch of civilians pitch to zillionares for cash and | mentoring in return for a stake in the business - all on TV). | | You see some absolute horrors that inevitably will lead to | bankruptcy. However you also see some clever folk getting a | well deserved leg up. | | But I think we agree that for everyone that seems to | effortlessly do the American Dream thing, there are 1000s or | 100,000s that don't. Then there's the likes of me that have | run a rather boring small business for 22 years turning over | around PS1.2M pa but not exactly setting the world on fire! I | can sleep at night and have nearly no debt, so that's nice. | hvs wrote: | Maybe it's just me getting older, but running a successful | small business that pays the bills and supports my family | into retirement is what I would consider the paradigm of | success for my life. Congrats on your business. | nostromo wrote: | I just want to point out that you're living the American | Dream. I think you may misunderstand the term as it's | generally used. | | The phrase isn't about becoming a billionaire. It's rooted | in the American frontier period, inspired by Protestant | values, and is much more aligned with living a happy upper- | middle-class life: owning land, a home, enough resources to | have a family, and having meaning work. | ROTMetro wrote: | I wouldn't even say upper-middle-class. Descended from | Irish orphans, jewish refugees, Pennsylvania Dutch coal | miners (so the classic Amish Jewish Redhead, without red | hair). A relatively safe work environment, owning a home, | feeding their family, not having your government try to | exterminate you. That was their American dream. You know, | the little things. | [deleted] | abraxas wrote: | Moreover, just with the sheer count of VCs, stock investors and | other sorts that play with their (or more often other people's) | money to try and earn outsized profits, it is inevitable that a | small sliver of them will be wildly successful. It's a | statistical certainty. It's like having a million people toss | coins all day and then hail as geniuses those who got twenty | heads in a row. | | There is an excellent book by Nassim Taleb that expands on this | theme titled "Fooled By Randomness". | _ttg wrote: | Related classic - How I won the lottery by Darius Kazemi | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw | stomczyk09 wrote: | Success is something that tends to be propogated when being | communicated to the masses, but success is such a general word. | Success isn't a one size fits all. It can be as simple as passing | a test in school, graduating said school, paying off your | mortgage/debt. | | Success comes in all shapes and sizes. | [deleted] | Uhhrrr wrote: | The airplane bullets story actually shows how success stories can | be valuable. If you take them in aggregate and look at what's not | there, there are some common themes: | | - No one ever says they gave up | | - No one ever says they wasted time on petty distractions | | - No one ever says they saw a great opportunity and passed on it | | etc. | notahacker wrote: | That says more about the framing of success stories than | anything else. When your third company sells for seven figures, | you get to say your first and second were learning experiences | rather than things you had to give up because they weren't | going to succeed. When you're a unicorn, you get to build side | projects or embark upon codebase rewrites involving more people | than most companies ever hire, and people will praise both your | desire to explore new ideas decisiveness when you fire them and | shut them down rather than dismissing it as a petty distraction | (and something you gave up on). And the most successful | startups get to say all the many investment and acquisition | offers and commercial deals they passed on _weren 't_ great | opportunities, and have reason to even believe it. | | If we're doing airplane bullet stories, it's like trying to | figure out how to fix airframes by looking at the aircraft that | didn't get hit at all... | f17 wrote: | _No one ever says they saw a great opportunity and passed on | it_ | | I had the opportunity to buy Bitcoin in 2010 and didn't. I was | simultaneously correct (about the moral value and nature of the | thing) and utterly, utterly wrong (about what it would do | between then and zero, and thus from a personal financial | standpoint). | | I had too much faith in humanity to invest in Bitcoin. Whoops. | Turned out degenerate nihilism was the winning bet. | wolverine876 wrote: | IIRC Churchill said about the US, hoping for entry into WWII: | 'They always do the right thing, after exhausting all other | possibilities.' | codalan wrote: | I don't always indulge in toxic positivity, but when I do, I | LinkedIn. | | /s | avg_dev wrote: | Single most inane social media feed out there. | robotnikman wrote: | Couldn't agree more | billllll wrote: | Attributing most success to luck also doesn't seem to be very | productive. What's the end goal? | | If your end goal is to put down the success of others and make | yourself feel better for not achieving the same level of success, | then I guess this article is great for that. | | However, if your end goal is to maybe one day be as successful or | more so, then IMO this article isn't that useful. I strongly | believe in the saying that "experience is a poor teacher," and in | that case it's worth seeking out the successful experiences of | others even if it's not an exact template we can follow. | s1artibartfast wrote: | People often confuse necessary vs complete criteria for success. | | The classic example is being smart, getting educated call office | and working hard. | | They won't guarantee success but it certainly improves your | personal chances versus doing the exact opposite. | nasir wrote: | Tonight I went for a walk with the 15 yo son of my neighbour who | said he wants to start his own company and have 1 million by the | time he turns 18. I asked him, what do you have in mind? He said, | I want to build a company that is cash positive and then reinvest | its profit in itself and grows. | | I told him this really does not mean anything. You need to have | concrete steps toward this goal which is only 3 years away. | | I think those who really wants to achieve the so-called "success" | will just go figure it out rather than constantly reading those | success story. Yeah perhaps at the very beginning of the journey | you get inspired by reading a few of those. | | But the rest is basically taking concrete steps and trying stuff | out until it sticks. And the best way to do that is to go figure | out HOW those people in the success story did it. | | At least at the end he was happy with the answer. | wolverine876 wrote: | (Without knowing the person at all), I would have asked, | 'why?'. Lots of _kids these days_ seem to be just following | these paths blindly. A million dollars can be a means to | something; it 's not a goal. | | 'kids these days' - maybe this was always true, but it seems | like they are trapped in a cycle of trauma, thinking life is a | struggle to survive. | robotnikman wrote: | It doesn't help that kids now are bombarded by rich | influencers all the time on social media. | metadat wrote: | This pattern of the get-rich-quick mentality is alarmingly | pervasive among youngsters today. | | Even more common are kids who plan to get rich being a famous | TikTokker, IGer, of YouTuber. | | Since there's not much I can do about it, I'm just curious to | see how this shakes out over time. | neura wrote: | There have been many people trying to get rich quick in | previous generations, as well. If it's growing over time, | faster than the "work hard and rise to the top" or other | segments of the population, it may be because "working hard" | in the same kinds of jobs (level of skill, amount of effort | required, etc) people were doing 50 years ago is much less | likely to get you to the same level of independence and | wealth that it would have 50 years ago. | | I think this entire discussion is more about opportunities | and the common debate is between older generations that think | young people have the same opportunities now that they had | when they were young VS young people now believing they do | not have those opportunities. I mean, is this not the basis | for the entire "OK, boomer" response/meme? | | When looking at specific success stories, I think the people | talking about luck being opportunity have the right of it. | Sure, there might be some plan old luck involved and there's | surely a large amount of persistence and effort involved, but | it does seem rare to hear about what created the opportunity | for the success. | | Everybody talking about survivorship bias are really talking | about how the success story, as told by people involved in | the success, are rarely looking to download their involvement | and talk about the opportunities they had, but instead want | to show how their involvement and the things they did are the | key to the success. | ryandrake wrote: | I mean, it kind of makes sense. These kids aren't stupid. | They see that most of the upward mobility ladders have been | pulled up by the last generation to climb them, and there's | not much left besides gambling on meme stocks, OnlyFans, and | trying to become a popular streamer. | | They look at their Millennial parents generation and say "Why | would I want to study hard, go to college, and work my ass | off? That's what you did and you have six figures of debt and | work at Starbucks!" We were suckers and believed in class | mobility. I think the next generation of kids are more | observant and cynical and have figured out the deck is | stacked against them. | eo3x0 wrote: | There's a lot of negativity towards capitalism here in this | thread which is hard for me to understand when the average | Hacker News user is upper middle class chatting away on | social media in the middle of a work day. It seems like | capitalism has done exactly a great job in lifting people | out of poverty and continues to do so. | | A lot of the negativity simply comes from being detached | from real problems, in my opinion. | rightbyte wrote: | A study in bourgeois identity crisis. "Anti-work anti- | Caren" sentiment. Some Reddit meme I believe. | jamiek88 wrote: | Or maybe we don't want to pull the ladder up after us and | a lot of us came from poverty too and remember it and | have empathy with those still there? | ramphastidae wrote: | Being able to use social media during the work day | doesn't make housing or health care any more affordable. | Don't those count as real problems? | f17 wrote: | You, shall we say, "had a learning experience" if it's 2022 and | your son still believes in capitalism. | | Maybe it's too late for us old farts, but the generation coming | up needs to overthrow the corporate system--and they need to | start while they're young and have the energy, and the best of | us oldsters will be around to help them, so there's no time | like the present--if they want to have a future. There is none | in the current socioeconomic system, not for real humans (as | opposed to ultrawealthy ghouls). | inglor_cz wrote: | Corporations as structures aren't going away. | | Over the centuries, they spread from England to the rest of | the world because they play an important role quite well: | they allow people to pool their resources for a common | project while protecting their non-invested personal assets | from potential bankruptcy. | | People want to do business. People want themselves and their | families to be protected from utter financial ruin if their | project fails and ends in bankruptcy. People want to maintain | some kind of continuity in businesses even if an important | individual dies or becomes incapacitated. | | Legal personae - corporations - are the solution to this set | of requirements, whose functionality has been tested by | centuries. They will outlast us for this reason alone. | jollybean wrote: | Your neighbour's son is likely going to be quite successful at | least on some level, and he may even get to his $1M. | | "It doesn't mean anything" - the opposite, it means a lot, it's | 'a (personal) goal' - which is how people focus and motivate | themselves. | | "the rest is basically taking concrete steps and trying stuff | out until it sticks." - well kind of. Yes, you have to 'take | steps' at some point, but 'what steps?' to 'what end?' etc. | etc.. | | I think it's probably slightly more beneficial to have people | focused on growing the pie, and having a nice way to captures | surpluses, as opposed to just "I want to make money" but just | having the later is a formidable goal. | jackcosgrove wrote: | Of course people want to ascribe agency to success, and | necessarily failure. The flip side of luck is fate. | | Just look at the success of ideas like predestination and | physical determinism vs. free will in the "marketplace of ideas". | Many people _really_ don 't like it when you strip them of | agency, no matter how flimsy the story told to fill the void. | betwixthewires wrote: | The analogy to the world war 2 bomber story is applicable _only_ | if you accept the core premise of the article: that most of it | boils down to luck. | | If the successes of the successful really are the result of their | decisions, planning, approach, or other action on their behalf, | then where the bullet holes wound up on an airplane isn't | analogous. | | I personally do think that luck has a lot to do with it, but it's | not sheer luck, it's recognizing opportunity and capitalizing. | Yes, the iPhone wouldn't exist if it weren't for the DoD building | GPS. But the DoD building GPS didn't make the iPhone either. | Apple made the iPhone, while other competitors tried to make | something like it. It was the _decisions_ that led to the iPhone | that can teach us about it 's success. | | Every set of decisions occurs within an environment. The | parameters of that environment can be called "luck" if you want, | and success within that environment can be ascribed to the | environment itself by way of the word "luck." But looking at it | that way tells you less about success than the success stories. | After you armor the engines and you get more planes making it | home, you don't call that luck, you call that good decision | making. And you ascribe the success to the decisions, you don't | dismiss them as survivorship bias. | crotho wrote: | the_af wrote: | I don't think the article is arguing that it's just luck, just | that luck plays a huge role. | | But also, and more importantly, the article seems to be arguing | that these success stories are mostly unhelpful. If you do all | that Steve Jobs did, it's likely you won't be even remotely | successful as he was. "Stay hungry, stay foolish" is | inspirational -- I like the quote -- but also mostly | meaningless. Like "follow your passion", "work hard", etc. Yes, | we all already _know_ this, and it mostly won 't help us become | the next Steve Jobs. | betwixthewires wrote: | I'd agree that these pop, self help seminar success stories | are unhelpful, but for different reasons (although they are | mentioned in the article): people with these stories rarely | mention the not so pretty parts of the story unless those | parts serve to "teach a lesson" in line with the narrative in | the story, and that successful people tend to ascribe success | disproportionately to themselves in a manner very akin to | superstition. Most of what they're telling you were the keys | to their success will be unhelpful, nevertheless, examining | their success with your own mind and not with their words can | show you a great deal about what works and what doesn't. | icambron wrote: | I'll add that it propagates the other way too: only those | who've positioned themselves to take advantage of changes in | the environment can get lucky. Taking the iPhone example: have | you built a team of engineers, designers, and manufacturing | experts able to create and launch an iPhone when it becomes | possible? One company did. This is what VC types call "creating | your own luck". Being prepared to seize new opportunities | doesn't make them happen, but they happen often enough that | being prepared for them has a positive expected value. | | How do you, personally, prep for luck? By cultivating valuable | skills, minimizing overhead and commitments, earning the | respect of a lot people, having a well-calibrated risk | tolerance, and so on. You are trying to turn luck from a | necessary but insufficient condition to a necessary and | _sufficient_ one. | goatcode wrote: | I'd agree; you can't boil it down to just luck or just hard | work. I think it a correct notion that fortune favors the | prepared, and neither luck nor hard work on its own suffices. | | If you look more closely, I believe that hard work, luck, | nepotism and sociopathy all become apparent factors in | successful business, with their levels being able to be | exchanged to some degree (with some having a greater amount of | variability, depending on variation of the others). | | In the end: you are right; a bar of gold can fall onto a dead | body, but he's no better for it. | 411111111111111 wrote: | Luck alone _is_ sufficient. As a simple example: if you 've | been born into the Gates or Zuckerberg family you will have | as many tries as you need until you succeed. | | And if you've been born in some parts of Africa you're almost | certainly going to be SOL | UIUC_06 wrote: | Ancient Yiddish humor: | | Old man, dying, calls out to God, "Why couldn't I at least win | the lottery?" | | And God says, "Why couldn't you at least buy a ticket?" | | People complain because there isn't a formula for success and the | propaganda stories promise one, but don't deliver. It's not their | fault that they don't deliver, because no one can. It's your | fault for even thinking there _was_ a formula. And it 's their | fault for encouraging you to think that. | paulpauper wrote: | A lot of it is that people want to be told what they want to | hear. | inglor_cz wrote: | This idea ("almost everything is luck") is not exactly rare. But | the author has a giant blind spot when he cites the story of | Abraham Wald while ignoring a glaring case of similar gap in his | own argument. | | _There are tons of people who had all the luck in the world and | they didn 't achieve much at all._ | | Just look at his long list of all the lucky circumstances that | Steve Jobs had to encounter ("he was born in the USA", "GPS was | funded", "all the necessary technologies necessary to create an | iPhone already existed"). | | True, but Steve Jobs wasn't the only one who had this kind of | luck. Most of these conditions are wide enough that, in their | intersection, there were at least several million other | individuals whose activity _didn 't_ result in anything | remarkable. | | At which moment we are back to square one. Was Jobs' life story a | propaganda? Perhaps, but if you want to recast it as an end | product of several instances of luck, you need to explain all the | duds too. | | An interesting example is Elon Musk. Whenever Musk is discussed | on Reddit or on HN, there is a glut of forists who explain that | someone born into this kind of wealth and privilege simply _had_ | to be wildly successful. | | But Musk's own brother Kimbal, who grew up in the very same | family and environment, is barely known. | noasaservice wrote: | _Capitalist propaganda_ | avindroth wrote: | Is it so hard to imagine that some people get genuinely inspired | by stories of other people's successes? | | Yes, some success stories are propaganda. But many others are | genuinely inspiring (and have something to teach us). For what | it's worth, I think this extreme take is more propaganda than | most success stories. | pessimizer wrote: | > Is it so hard to imagine that some people get genuinely | inspired by stories of other people's successes? | | It's impossible not to imagine. That's the purpose of | propaganda, to move people. | paulpauper wrote: | For something to be teachable it must be reproducible to some | degree. Because the number of failures is hidden, it's | impossible to know what actually works or not. You're only | seeing the numerator and not the denominator too. That's why | survivorship bias is so important. | Lammy wrote: | > I think this extreme take is more propaganda than most | success stories. | | Success stories are not propaganda in the sense that they are | false stories you would be convinced to believe. They're | propaganda in the sense that hearing them influences you to | believe in the economic system itself and then spread | (propagate) those stories to others. | cuteboy19 wrote: | Doesn't this kind of imply that the other economic system are | either full of failures or at the very least don't have that | many success stories? | hammock wrote: | >some people get genuinely inspired by stories | | Isn't that the explicit purpose of propaganda? Why do people | get so hung up on delegitimizing the outcome of anything stuck | with the label "propaganda"? | [deleted] | em-bee wrote: | because propaganda implies a nefarious agenda. | | propaganda by popular definition is not legitimate | s1artibartfast wrote: | So anything inspirational is propaganda? Where do you draw | the line? This is clearly an incomplete definition of | propaganda... | jollybean wrote: | Whether they are 'inspiring' or not is one thing, whether they | are legit or not is another. | mrtksn wrote: | Just knowing that something is possible is a huge motivator and | a motivated person is much more likely to succeed. | | In sports, it's common theme to think that something is | impossible until someone does it and the previously impossible | achievement becomes the new standart as more and more people | start doing it. | f17 wrote: | Success stories in capitalism are usually heavily censored to | hide the trail of wrecked careers, shady dealings, and | invisible nepotism that occurred along the way. | | If you want to know the truth about a company, ask its least | popular member... or, better yet, someone who was fired. | sircastor wrote: | When I was interviewing most recently I always included a | question along the lines of "what do you hate here?" And | while I didn't ever hear about firings, I did often hear | about issues that regular workers saw in their company. It | was enlightening. | caseyross wrote: | Success stories would have been mostly accurate in prehistoric | times. In a tribe of a few dozen people, it's quite imaginable | that one person might be able to "disrupt" the status quo through | singlehanded grit, determination, or heroism. | | But these kind of narratives are a poor fit for the complexity of | our modern world. Even without considering the issue of | deliberate propaganda, it simply isn't possible in practice for a | modern citizen to wrap their mind around all relevant factors | that led to success or failure. | manholio wrote: | While I agree with the sentiment, I think this text is pushing it | a bit to far. There exist mathematic, cultural, psychological and | anthropological truths that can help one navigate towards success | in the world of humans, it's not all random noise. | | For example: | | 1. Getting yourself organized and goal oriented, focused on what | you can control, your behavior and decisions, instead of wasting | time fantasizing about the lives of great men and the myriad ways | your environment differs from Silicon Valley in the 70s. For | example, a simple tool like the "Getting things done" methodology | helped me to increase my productivity significantly. Some other | tool might work for you, as long as you can stay on goal and | deliver. | | 2. Understanding the exponential curve and the power of compound | interest. Wealth is built by capital accumulation via compound | interest, you start with just your two hands, reinvest the | proceeds in growth and watch you empire grow. Once you accumulate | seed capital, everything becomes easier, money is like a | superpower and you can direct people around you to work towards | your vision. | | Cultural norms are strongly favoring linear career goals, ex. | becoming a doctor, so it's very hard, risky and counterintuitive | to go against your peer group and position yourself on an | exponential growth path. | | 3. Understanding people are political animals, always competing | for power and resources. This is true for any organization, team, | project, people will obey power and getting and wielding power is | a complementary goal to money, one leads to the another. A strong | way to accrue political capital is to build networks, meet and | keep good relations with many powerful people that can be useful | and for which you are useful. | | These examples are some very general and powerful concepts that | are likely to remain true for a long time and that most | successful people use at least instinctively. They are necessary | to greatly increase the odds of success, but of course, vastly | insuficient to guarantee it. | dr-detroit wrote: | sumanthvepa wrote: | I've always felt that a collection of deep analyses about | entrepreneurial failures would be more valuable than any success | story. One of the reasons, I find startup school useful is that, | it seems like the advice is based on observation of failure, | rather than success alone. I wish more individual (suitably | anonymised) information could be provided for further research. | gjvc wrote: | like brag posters in the bathroom | skyyler wrote: | What do you mean by this? It seemed idiomatic but I can't find | examples of other people using this phrase. | JoshCole wrote: | It isn't "just" propaganda. A success story is fundamentally a | communication that relates to positive expected value. Picking | examples might make it seem like success stories are just | propaganda, but you can trick yourself with biased sampling quite | easily. | | Consider a different example of a success story: the | communication of the presence of food by ants to other ants. A | fundamental part of their thinking is tied up in the idea of | communicating these successes. For them, it isn't "just" | propaganda. | | Interestingly - we've had something close to a controlled | experiment about the viability of not communicating what we think | success is with humans. There was once a theory that if you | didn't tell anything to another human they would learn a divine | language. To test this a child was separated from the general | population and raised with caregivers who did not speak to them. | As you might imagine, this did not produce a divine language or | an especially intelligent child. It produced a feral child. | | In actuality, I think you can relate communication of expected | values back to a solution to a foundational problem and dialectic | tension in learning problems in complex environments: the explore | exploit problem. The literature calls these multi-armed bandit | problems. | | Social species, such as ants and humans, use communication about | expected values to make their search over their reward landscape | more effective. Actions are conditioned on the outcome signals | communicated through the environment, creating a kind of lookup | cache of better than random strategy. | | So there is something deeper going on here than "just" | propaganda. | | If I'm right about that, a natural question is to ask "why would | people conclude it was just propaganda" and I'll skip the obvious | reason that the phrasing feels wrong and so the author just did | it to attract attention. | | This property of valuable utility information in expected value | calculations makes sharing success stories high utility. However, | some people are low utility producers and want to signal being | high utility for various reasons. So there are going to be some | success stories that are fabricated. We have a lot of people. So | we have a lot of people sampling from stories and some of those | people are going to draw samples of stories where propaganda | really is the best description. | | So you can arrive at this belief without needing to be attention | seeking and then what happens when you test it? Well, it seems | right - there really isn't guarantee of success. | | Unfortunately, separate to this is the actual viability of | following advice gleaned from success stories. To see why it can | help to go back to a simple case, like an ant following the high | confidence pheromone trail. It may indeed not find food at the | end of the trail, but that property has a lot to do with the | environment. It isn't fully a thing about success stories, but a | property of how hard problems can be. They probably wouldn't be | better off abandoning the use of pheromone trails. | | This becomes more obvious when you start giving great examples of | success stories. For example, when people comment that | mathematics was useful and encourage that we teach it, should we | conclude that the success they derived from it is "just" | propaganda? | | Or how about recasting their own great example of a great success | story - they relates a success story about how people managed to | infer something about failure cases. Their argument about why to | focus on failure actually contains a sub-component of the the | success story that comes from focusing on failure. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-15 23:00 UTC)